The Paradox in Late Antiquity: Concept and Impact

Late-antique texts traditionally associated with the history of religion are rarely read alongside texts that seem, from a modern viewpoint, to pertain to the history of science or even technology. Moreover, these so-called “religious texts” are usually analyzed with regard to their theology rather than the concept of nature they portray. The present project seeks to offer a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing late-antique texts, irrespective of their prior classifications as magical, religious or technical, with the goal of discerning their attitudes towards the paradox. The paradox is here, alongside the late antique terminology, conceived of as a polyvalent category comprising natural wonders as well as man-made and divine miracles - a distinction that was introduced to separate between texts belonging to the history of religion and texts that did not. Either way, the paradox stands at the intersection of concepts of nature and the divine and is the ideal starting point for analyzing a concept of nature that apparently included the possibility of both, divinely caused and natural paradoxes. Indeed, it seems that the late antique paradigm under scrutiny in this project positioned and favored the paradox in a way that enabled it to have a stimulating impact on epistemological and technical developments. The aim of the present project is to trace this stimulating impact from the first to sixth centuries CE in areas such as rhetoric, recipe literature, the interpretation of signs and portents, art (paintings, mosaics, sculptures etc., to which paradoxes were often a silent stimulus) and celebrations (as paradoxes often occasioned them). This research project, apart from these historical investigations, attempts to establish new methods for approaching late-antique texts by asking more comprehensive and less category-bound questions.